Easy as Pi

It’s probably not a coincidence that a number of people want to write about the muchlauded Raspberry Pi single-board computer, and our regular columnist Charly isn’t going to blow raspberries.

The Raspberry Pi [1] grew on a vine sponsored by a British foundation. The intent was to create a low-budget, single-board computer to reduce the cost of computer science lessons at schools. The inventor estimated that a low four-figure number of Raspberries would be needed to break even, but this was way off the mark – the demand is huge. For around US$ 35 (UK£ 22, EUR 25) plus taxes, shipping, and handling, consumers receive an ARM minicomputer with 256MB of RAM – if you can get one that is. I waited more than three months for my Raspberry (Figure 1), and I was lucky – I’m told that pre-orders are well into the millions.

Sys admin columnist Charly never takes a vacation from the Internet. A beach bar with WiFi is quickly found, but it runs a forced proxy, which thinks that the SSH port (22) is in league with the devil and blocks the connection. Time to drill a tunnel.